dir. Shane Meadows
Opens Fri Sept 5 at the Metro. Despite the joke Sergio Leone title and the twangy faux-Ennio Morricone music, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands isn't so much a parody of a Western as a rethinking of classic Western conventions... that just happens to be set in the tract-house landscape of Nottingham, England. It certainly doesn't feel like a Western when ne'er-do-well Robert Carlyle is watching a trash TV show--the British Jenny Jones, apparently--and spots his ex (Shirley Henderson) being proposed to on camera by her boyfriend (Rhys Ifans). She says no, which is enough to send Carlyle, a small-time crook who left her with a daughter years ago, back to Nottingham to reclaim his old life. Will Henderson choose her sweet-natured dullard or her dashing criminal?
Director Shane Meadows, whose previous films Twenty Four Seven and A Room for Romeo Brass had the same blue-collar, fish-and-chips-in-a-newspaper feel, puts a healthy comic charge into this stuff. But he has a fatal flaw for a would-be parodist: He loves his characters, and his actors, too much. The wounded beauty of teeny-tiny Shirley Henderson (Wonderland, Topsy-Turvy) perfectly fits her uncertain single mom, and finds its counterpoint in her levelheaded daughter (Finn Atkins). Rhys Ifans (Hugh Grant's lummox roommate in Notting Hill) is a close human approximation of a golden retriever: blond, earnest, stupid-faced, and slightly too large for any room he's in. You understand why Henderson would love him, and why she might get tired of him. And Carlyle is so good at giving shaded life to bastards. We haven't even mentioned the supporting roles of Ricky Tomlinson and Kathy Burke, two homely, lovely stalwarts of British cinema.
So, there is much that is nice about this movie (I especially like a film that can have us concluding in the first 10 minutes that the Rhys Ifans character is a hopeless wanker and have us fervently rooting for him by the end). Its niceness, in fact, actually keeps it minor. The whole thing is like spending a beery evening in an utterly ordinary pub: The jukebox is good and the company is warm, even if very little seems to happen. CLAUDE ROC
Bollywood/Hollywood
dir. Deepa Mehta
Opens Fri Sept 5 at the Seven Gables. Those who found the massive crowds for My Big Fat Greek Wedding perplexing will undoubtedly be just as perplexed by Bollywood/Hollywood. Is the film bad? Yes--at least to me. Will it be a breakthrough success, residing at some theater here in town for months on end? Probably.
The story is your typical romantic comedy/mix-up/shenanigans affair, though given a special dash of ethnic wackiness via Indians attempting to keep their culture intact while living in Ontario, Canada. The plot: Rahul, a young, rich businessman, loses his honky fiancée in an unfortunate (read: painfully unfunny) spiritual- levitation accident. This, it turns out, is welcome news to his mother and grandmother, both of whom desire for him to marry an Indian woman. Rahul, though, shuns the traditional life, wishing instead to marry whoever he chooses, be she white, black, or Indian. Such stubborness leads Rahul's mother and grandmother to desperate measures, swearing that Rahul's younger sister cannot have her planned marriage until Rahul gets married himself. So what's a young, rich Indian businessman to do? The answer: Hire an escort named Sue to pretend to be his fiancée, then break into song occasionally until the inevitable happy conclusion.
Often grating, and only occasionally inspired, Bollywood/Hollywood attempts to celebrate India's cinematic brilliance. It fails, and you'd be better served by heading to Scarecrow and renting that brilliance for yourself. A suggestion: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
The Trip
dir. Miles Swain
Opens Fri Sept 5 at the Varsity. Early in The Trip, Alan (Larry Sullivan)--a sweaty, slightly melted-looking version of Wonder Years star Fred Savage in a really bad wig--meets, per the "plot" of this "film," Tommy (Steve Braun). That they soon fall in love is the first sign of where this movie is headed, because these actors have the romantic chemistry of fish sticks. Not that you even notice: Their cheap '70s wigs are so brittle and misshapen, so constantly in need of adjusting, that it becomes hard to pay attention to the story. (It's enormously distracting, during a pivotal exchange of dialogue, when an actor's head turns and part of his hair doesn't.) It's not that the film has no production values; it's that it has no values whatsoever.
Written and directed by Miles Swain, The Trip is a gay cliché puree, shrouded in pastry dough and wrapped into a cannoli, spanning two generations (the bad '70s wigs become bad '80s wigs) and featuring a cast of cardboard cutouts alternately pumped with sedatives and speed. One contrived character has the distinction of being thrown to the ground and kicked in the stomach by a homophobic Mexican cop (you know those homophobic Mexican cops), and then, minutes later, after coughing exactly twice, dying of AIDS while sitting up in a car. (Maybe all the money they could have spent getting a script together went toward securing the rights to the Pointer Sisters' "Jump [For My Love]," which is played during the one scene in the movie that has a glimmer of charm.) After Tommy dies--oh, fuck off, you're not going to make it to the end of this movie anyway--the whole thing ends with Alan standing on a cliff, looking into a canyon, as if we're supposed to care. That's when they should have played "Jump." CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
